Knowledge seekers are mobile: Is your data?
Mobile devices are ubiquitous in today’s workplaces. As smartphones and tablets come to dominate information-seeking behaviors of employees, it’s crucial for knowledge managers to optimize KM for mobile. There’s no scarcity of considerations for KM practitioners seeking to accommodate new information access patterns. They must sift through numerous issues pertaining to how enterprise knowledge is captured, disseminated, secured, and made compliant.
As pressing as these concerns are, there’s one overarching consideration that’s paramount for organizations assessing the adoption of mobile technologies for KM. It’s the fact that most employees desire to use their mobile devices in their personal and professional lives. Plus, they expect mobile access to be present.
“I think there’s that expectation at this point,” acknowledged Kurt Rapelje, Laserfiche director of strategic partnerships. “Most large organizations and large software applications ... have a mobile component that you can download and use.”
In some ways, applying KM practices to mobile technologies is fundamentally similar to doing so for technologies in traditional office settings—particularly for those with cloud-based solutions. The objective is always to establish the parameters, definitions, and conceptual models for KM; apply them to enterprise content; and make it searchable and easily consumable for downstream applications.
Nonetheless, optimizing for mobile technologies often requires deciding between two distinct approaches. According to Lou Bachenheimer, CTO, Americas for SS&C Blue Prism, the first “is to make a custom app going in, using something like Angular, and making something specifically designed for a mobile phone. The other option is building something a little bit more generic, something web-based or browser-based. That way, you want it to be able to recognize that someone’s coming on a mobile device, or tablet, or typical computer browser and update the screen appropriately so it’s usable.”
Both of these approaches have distinct advantages, especially when no- and low-code design measures are involved to manage and implement processes for any number of use cases.
No-code design
As Rapelje mentioned, several KM systems, content services, and document repositories have mobile applications to facilitate the convenience, ease of use, and ubiquitous access for which mobile technologies are desired. Oftentimes, these applications are exclusively architected for smartphones. One of the boons of the browser-based approach Bachenheimer described is that it’s useful for multiple devices—including phones, tablets, laptops, and desktop computers. With this approach, when any of these options are employed, the system “updates the screen appropriately so it’s usable,” Bachenheimer noted. “The software should adapt to the different mobile devices.”
Organizations can construct these centralized applications with business process management (BPM) tooling, which is predicated on a variety of no- and low-code constructs. Top offerings entail point-and-click, drag-and-drop functionality alongside prebuilt templates and what Bachenheimer termed an “app store” for initiating these endeavors.
There’s an assortment of best practices to abide by when designing an application for a document repository to be accessed via multiple devices. According to Bachenheimer, there are some options, “When previewing what a page looks like, there’s a toggle switch that lets you switch between a computer browser, tablet, or mobile while you render. You want to be sure that while doing this, things scale appropriately. You don’t want something getting weird and not fitting [the screen] anymore. You don’t want people to have to scroll sideways on a phone.”